Mike Lock appointed group CTO as Dotlines Global unifies technology strategy

“The next chapter”

Dotlines Global (DOTL), an AIM-listed company, has appointed Mike Lock as Chief Technology Officer, in a move that signals more than a change of title. It marks a strategic pivot for the group: a shift toward digital transformation across the full portfolio, with the goal of accelerating its planned development of its products and services with clear focus on user experience (UX) and expanding its AI and ML security capability.

In his new role, Lock takes responsibility for the global technology strategy across Catena, Sohoj, Audra Security and Carnival Internet UK, bringing a group of previously separate products and business units together under a single, unified technology direction for the first time.

Lock takes the CTO role with a track record built across over 26 years in telecoms and managed services, including time at Maintel and Azzurri Communications developing award winning platforms and services for large public and private sector companies, before helping steer Dotlines Global's own product and technology function over the last two years. This isn't an appointment built around a new face with a fresh set of slides, but a recognition of someone who already understands the group's customers and platforms, what they've proven they can do, and where the bigger opportunity now lies.

Why now

Following its recent listing on the AIM market in early May 2026, Dotlines Global, with its head office based in London, is a group of technology businesses spanning telecoms, digital infrastructure, cybersecurity and fintech across 17 countries worldwide. This appointment is a continuation of the company's strategic goal to bring these products and services closer together within the group, to broaden its portfolio and best leverage its own intellectual property.

That track record across the group is exactly why the next step makes sense. Their platforms and services have already handled the operational complexity of running businesses at scale and have, by definition, solved a lot of hard problems. The question Lock has been asking is a simple one: why should that capability, and the innovation behind it, stay confined to separate silos, when a shared strategy can raise the bar for all products together and bring real value to its customers.

“Mike has been central to our technology strategy from the start, and this appointment reflects that,” says Jaki Chowdhury, CEO of Dotlines Global. “He understands where technology needs to go next, and he's the right person to lead that transformation across the group.”

A group-wide digital transformation

Each of the group's businesses has built deep expertise and a genuinely strong track record across telecoms, security and connectivity over many years, and that expertise isn't going anywhere. What's changing is not the “What”, but the “How,” and bringing it together at a group level means the strength built in one part of the business can now benefit every other part too, rather than staying inside the team that built it.

That shift matters beyond language, and with a modular approach, new features and capabilities don't need to be built four times over inside four separate teams, as instead they're built once, at group level, and rolled out wherever they're relevant, building “digital assets” that can be leveraged across the business. That's a materially faster route from idea to delivery, and it only works if the group's engineering talent operates as one genuinely global team rather than four parallel ones.

“At the heart of this change is a simple ethos: ‘Develop once, deliver many,’” Lock says. “Since joining the business back in early 2024, I've been amazed by the technology and expertise the business has already built over the years but I have always felt that if we brought it together at a group level, we could really maximise our output and outcomes for customers. By cross-pollinating our teams, our technology and our knowledge across the group, every customer benefits from the same standard of innovation regardless of the product they're consuming or the industry, and that shared foundation becomes the springboard for new technologies that raise capability across everything the group offers.”

In practice, that means innovation and features built for one part of the business can reach customers elsewhere in a fraction of the time it would take to build separately, and it means real efficiencies from not duplicating engineering effort across four different functions. It also means the group's development capability with UK-originated strategic direction and an Asia-based engineering team, is working as one, rather than in parallel, operating against a single roadmap instead of four competing ones.

That reframing is central to the revamped group strategy, as rather than a set of products and services built for particular verticals or geographic regions, the plan is a modular technology strategy that can be adopted piece by piece.

Alongside this shift, Lock is putting a renewed focus on research and development based in the UK, spanning all four businesses under his remit. The intention is to bring product direction and innovation closer to the strategic core of the group, giving it tighter control over where the group's technology goes next.

This doesn’t mean stepping away from the Asia-based development teams that have built these businesses to this point, and Lock is clear on that.

“The team in Asia has built real engineering capability, and that continues exactly as it is,” he says. “What we're adding is UK-based R&D that accelerates our AI and machine learning capability, build out real-time security architecture with Audra, drives the intelligent automation and orchestration at the heart of Catena, and delivers all of that straight into Sohoj, our digital lifestyle platform. This is just one example of looking holistically across the technology portfolio to see what is possible when we break down the silos of the group.”
It's a structure built for the next stage of growth rather than a reaction to the last one: UK-led strategic direction, delivered through established development backbones that already understand the platforms inside out.

What this means for customers

For customers across the group, whether they rely on Catena, Sohoj, Audra Security or Carnival Internet UK, the message is one of continuity plus investment. None of the platform’s customers depend on today are being pulled in a different direction; each is being developed further, backed by more resource, a single coordinated technology strategy, and more advanced AI and ML capability behind it.

Neatley, a UK telecoms group which runs its fixed, mobile, home and business connectivity operation on Catena, and Audra Security, is one example of the platform already managing customers, billing, CPE and provisioning at scale, with the same rigour now being extended, product by product, across the rest of the portfolio, with user experience and security raised to the same standard throughout.
There's a gap in the market for a genuinely joined-up group of business platforms that are modular and secure by design, and shaped by modern AI and ML, rather than a set of products that happen to sit under the same parent company. That's the space this next phase is aiming to fill.

Looking ahead

“This is one of the most exciting moments in Dotlines Global's history,” Lock says. “We're bringing together everything this group has built such as the engineering, the talent, the technology, and pointing all of it in one direction. AI and ML at the core, security built in from day one, and a user experience that is second to none: that's the standard every part of this business is now being held to. Get the technology right, and it doesn't stay in one place, it travels, it scales, and it lifts everything around it. That's the chapter we're writing now.”